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An Alabama inmate slated to be murdered by the state said prison staff stabbed him with needles for more than an hour as they tried to locate a vein during their first attempt to end his life via lethal injection.
Alan Eugene Miller, 57, said in September staff struggled to locate a vein into which to inject the deadly drug combination that was supposed to end his life and left him hanging vertically on a stretcher before officials made the decision to release the drug. to abort execution attempt.
Miller’s legal team detailed the botched September 22 execution in a lawsuit. They are now trying to prevent the state from attempting a second lethal injection.
The lawyers wrote that their client is now “the only living survivor of an execution” in the country, and is subject to “the needless and wanton infliction of pain that the Eighth Amendment intended to prohibit.”
According to the file, Miller was examined by prison staff for an hour as they tried to find a vein. He was pricked with needles in the arms, legs, feet and hands.
The two men in scrubs at one point used a cell phone flashlight to help them find a vein.
Miller was sentenced to death at the turn of the century after being convicted of a 1999 workplace outburst that killed three people: Terry Jarvis, Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy.
He used to be a truck driver.
Alan Eugene Miller, 57, (pictured here in 1999) was convicted in 2000 of the murder of three people during a workplace outburst. He would die on September 22, 2022 by lethal injection
Miller’s lawyers are now trying to stop the state from attempting to kill the killer a second time
On three separate occasions in the past five years, the state of Alabama has been involved in its attempts to administer a lethal injection to a death row inmate.
Alabama has asked the state Supreme Court to set a new date for Miller’s execution, arguing that the first go-around was canceled only because of the state’s late hour and midnight deadline to initiate the lethal injection process.
Miller said he was led to the execution room at 10 p.m. and tied to the stretcher at a quarter to time. At about 9 p.m. that evening (September 22), the U.S. Supreme Court had lifted an injunction blocking the lethal injection.
Two men, Miller reported through the court, used needles to examine his body for more than an hour.
“He felt that they were not reaching his veins, but were sticking near his veins,” the file says.
Miller is a 351-pound man, which makes it difficult for medical personnel to access his veins. He had previously asked to die from nitrogen hypoxia, a recently approved execution method that has not yet been tried in Alabama.
A third man eventually joined the group of probes and began hitting Miller on the neck in an apparent attempt to find a vein.
At 11:40 p.m. Miller says he was taken to a vertical position and left there for about 20 minutes before being told his execution had been postponed for the night.
‘Mr. Miller felt nauseous, disoriented, confused, and fearful of being killed, and was deeply disturbed by his image of state personnel staring at him silently from the observation room as he hung vertically from the stretcher. Blood was leaking from some of Mr Miller’s wounds,” the motion reads.
The body of one of Miller’s colleagues at Ferguson Enterprises is brought out by coroner’s staff. Miller killed three people on the morning of August 5, 1999
Miller requested that he die from nitrogen hypoxia, a recently approved execution method that has not yet been tried in Alabama. Due to its weight of 351 pounds, medical professionals sometimes have a hard time locating a vein
“Despite this botched execution, the physical and mental torture inflicted by Mr. Miller and the fact that defendants have now botched three lethal injection executions in just four years, defendants are relentlessly trying to re-execute Mr. of a lethal injection,” Miller’s legal team wrote, referring to one execution in Alabama that was canceled and another that took three hours to get underway.
“Then what, according to defendants, is a constitutional amount of time to stab someone with needles in an attempt to kill him?”
The September incident marks at least the third time the southern state has acknowledged problems with vein access during a lethal injection.
It took more than three hours for the July execution of Joe Nathan James to begin, and the state called off the execution of Doyle Hamm in 2018 after he was unable to locate an intravenous line.
The state attorney general’s office wrote, “Due to the late hour, the Alabama Department of Corrections was limited in attempts to gain intravenous access. ADOC made the decision at around 11:30 PM to stop its attempts to gain IV access, thereby canceling the court’s execution order.”